Artists often take the money and run – but we must say no to oil companies

The arts have banked on corporate sponsorship, but the City played its own role in causing cuts to our funding. And those organisations who accept cash from oil? They’re simply destroying the environment

The Liberate Tate group was founded with the intention to end Tate’s sponsorship by BP.
Photograph: Alamy

Artists often take the money and run – but we must say no to oil companies

The arts have banked on corporate sponsorship, but the City played its own role in causing cuts to our funding. And those organisations who accept cash from oil? They’re simply destroying the environment

For some 30 years now, many of us in the arts have prided ourselves on our skills as conmen. We can find the money, wherever it may be. And we can take it. And run.

It might not be the ideal situation. But ideal situations rarely come along. And Robin Hood isn’t such a bad thing to be. It’s often exciting to seem to be speaking the language of whichever funding body, foundation or corporate body we’re dealing with, while all the time telling ourselves that once we’ve got our hands on the cash we can carry on making exactly the same art that we’ve always wanted to make.

And it’s not like we’ve found ourselves in a Bullets Over Broadway situation. We haven’t dealt with gangsters. We haven’t had to cast gangsters’ molls in our shows. And we haven’t had to stage shows as a front for a bank robbery.

Although we have spent plenty of time inside the banks sorting out our corporate sponsorship deals. And plenty of time welcoming the banks’ senior figures into our corporate entertaining suites. While all the time the banks were pulling the world into a state of financial instability. Financial instability which would then lead to “austerity”, which would then in turn lead to cuts in, and possibly the end of, arts funding. You can hear the ironic laughter of posterity – it’s laughing at us – if you listen for a few minutes.

Maybe it would have been better to have taken gangster money in the first place. What’s worse? Robbing a bank or forming a corporate sponsor relationship with a bank?

But after all this time, aren’t we now starting to wonder who’s been fooling who?

Have we really spent all this time speaking in any-language-that-will-get-us-the-money without it corroding our own language, our own sense of who we are and what we do and our relationship with our audiences?

When I step into a room to see an artist’s work can I be, at one and the same time, with a person braver than myself who can face truths that I’ve been avoiding and who is also the best conman in town? Maybe yes. It could be one of the most fantastic contradictions of art. Or maybe it’s a terrible destructive contradiction that weakens the artist and the work.

Artists and money are always going to have a relationship status marked as “it’s complicated”. So as well as discussing the wider issues, I think it’s necessary that we start taking action on one concrete issue now: arts organisations’ sponsorship by oil. Here the case seems as stark as it can ever be. To halt climate change, the world needs to move away from fossil fuels. The fossil fuel industry wants to carry on promoting its product. Arts organisations who take their money are playing a part in the destruction of the environment. Artists should have no part in this. That’s something we can and must act on today.